I have triumphantly retuned to Berlin, land of club mate and hacker activism. It’s time for the yearly conference of Chaos Communications Congress, the longest running hacker con in the world. I have the honor of speaking with Herr Urbach of Telecomix, on “Your Disaster/Crisis/Revolution just got Pwned” We’ll be in Saal3 day four at 11:30a. The whole congress streams and you should definitely check out what you can, but definitely catch ours. Here’s the prezi we’ll use, check again later for an updated deck and video.

Sitting in the work area at bcc, while the network and other infrastructure are installed for the long days ahead. Learning about packets in packets. Learning about the historic relationship of names, biometrics, ownership, and sovereignty. Learning about the crazy haircuts that circumvent facial recognition. And, as a friend put it, “an entire airport just flew over my head” for Merideth Petterson’s talk on the Science of Insecurity, with Turing-complete code taking an infinite amount of time to secure. Cory Doctorow even gave a talk. All the talks are available online in the upcoming months – check them out.

Streams at http://wmv.28c3.fem-net.de/saal3 at 2:30a PST and 5:30a EST

More notes, this time from the self-organized sessions!

RHoK #4 is fast approaching! 32 cities around the globe are participating in this year’s global hackathon, happening December 3-4, 2011.

The what:
Random Hacks of Kindness is a volunteer technology community committed to making the world a better place through disaster response. They accomplish this by gathering twice yearly for a marathon hacking session to problem-solve issues of disaster response implementation, communication, and resource sharing. RHoK has been touted by FEMA as a group of dedicated volunteers who “develop software solutions for challenges facing humanity.”

The why:
RHoK focuses on capacity building: people, organizations, and the technology they use to help victims during a disaster. Previous projects have included optimizing the distribution and preservation of food, SMS social services directories, air and water quality monitoring, and various communication applications for locating the hardest-hit areas.

The where and when:
RHoK will be held in the following locations, with guidance from the mainstage locations, on December 3-4, 2011. An overview of the locations can be found here.

The who:
No, not the band. You. Get involved. Register at the individual location sites listed above, and get hacking to save the world.

Not close to a RHoK site? Host your own. Random Hacks of Kindness has put together a guide for first-time hackathon planning. Check it out here.

During STAR-TIDES @willowbl00 and I were introduced to an company that was incredibly eager to reach out to the hacker community and to open the source on some of their designs. They’re called Charity Help international and they were attending the conference to demonstrate one of their solar WIFI access points. We spoke with CHI founder and CEO Paul Stevers about the system he developed and avenues for improving it through connecting with the hacker community.

A diagram of the proposed server system.

The main concept is that CHI provides a solar powered WIFI access point at incredibly low cost to be installed in the AFCECO orphanages in Kabul. They’re made from out-of-the-box parts and strung together with a few simple server and database systems to provide a method of communication, a learning center, and the foundation for small businesses based on an internet cafe model.

Although they’ve solved a good number of problems with the mechanics and integration of the system it’s still built with a good deal of closed source technology and could use some refinement in how the long distance WIFI points are built.

Paul was kind enough to give us and outline of the issues he would like our help in tackling. Some of the problems are:

• Prioritizing traffic
• Download queuing for larger files
• Setting up a caching server
• Developing a payment system to use the access point as the basis of a small business
• Serving offline content such as such as the eGranary Digital Library using external drives

You can read Paul’s full proposal here. You can also get in touch with him via email here.

To learn about what’s going on in the nexus between hackers and the VTC you should follow GWOB on twitter here.

This is M@, writing on behalf of GWOB and reporting on the recent STAR-TIDES demo at Fort Mcnair ( http://star-tides.net/ ). @willowbl00 and I attended the demo day to see where hackers, makers, and the judicious application of open source technologies might fit in to existing relief applications and organizations. While there we met a fascinating collection of incredibly active super-powered geeks called the Synergy Strike Force.

The interior of the Synergy Strike Force tent, displaying their efforts to map Afghanistan, their education outreach programs, and their presence on the Playa.

The Synergy Strike Force is a self governing team of multifaceted brilliant citizen scientists who unite on various causes, pursue local contacts, and act with precision and focus to push technology and education into the most sensitive areas on the globe. They’re a led by Dr. Dr. Dave Warner [sic] who is known for his work in Afghanistan, at MindTel, and fleshing out the Open Street Map database in war-torn countries.

For a clearer view of what the Synergy Strike Force is about, you may wish to view this slideshow.For an even clearer view of what they’re about, you can get in touch with Dr. Dr. Dave Warner of Synergy Strike Force here.

To learn about what’s going on in the nexus between hackers and the VTC you should follow GWOB on twitter here.

Gisli Olafsson spoke at the end of the first day of Star-Tides about traditional relief organizations (including NGO and military) adopting and interacting with current technologies. Many organizations have only recently begun to have their own Twitter accounts, if they have one at all. The sheer prospect of drinking from a firehouse of information with no process for validation is a daunting one.

New organizations are popping up on a massive scale. After the Tsunami, 600 organizations showed up to help in the first 6 weeks. With Haiti, 4 THOUSAND organizations registered to help in first ten DAYS. Many of these organizations are new, and endorse crowd sourcing. They are equally adamant that more traditional structures are not a viable option.

Traditional humanitarian response is much more about coordination than collaboration, collaboration defined as working with someone to whom we are not immediately connected. A way of bridging the gap between coordination-heavy efforts and collaboration-heavy efforts is to bring the coordination into the infrastructure, not via the institution (see Clay Shirky TED talk on this for further explanation of this concept). It is not often recognized that individuals within organizations of either pole are who actually make the connections which make things possible. The organizations themselves get in the way when trying to respond to things on any sort of level. This is a drastic issue when the response rate continues in the bounded trend of involved geeks (see what I did there?) from Tsunami to Haiti.

The talk took place at and was recorded by The Wilson Center and can be found here. I’m incredibly impressed at the rate this went live!

***

What can we learn from these rather daunting datapoints?

Geeks Without Bound’s attempt to address this in some small way will be implemented for Random Hacks of Kindness #4 in Portland (also hopefully in our instances in San Francisco and Milwaukee). We will be bringing Challenges as well as Problem Definitions – not just what is perceived as being an issue but the entirety of the environment in which the solution must be implemented. We’ll hold a session on Friday evening to play games constructing those environments so the participating developers get a chance to fully understand what they are building for. We hope that you will join us the first weekend of December to build, to improve, and to save.

I did a talk at eComm (emerging communications) conference called “Communicating beyond the Horizon”. The associated Prezi can be found here: Communicating Beyond the Horizon

For the fourth year in a row, public, private and military sector groups will gather on a field at the National Defence University in Washington D.C. to show off the latest in sustainable technologies that can be deployed during post-war or post-disaster humanitarian relief projects.  Solutions which address a variety of problems — from energy and communications to shelter, potable water and sanitation — will be on display from Tuesday, October 4 at 9am through Friday, October 7 at 2pm. 

Organized by Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support (TIDES), this conference isnt only focused on the latest and greatest in sustainable disaster relief but also on communication and partnership between disaster relief groups, whether they are in the public, private, or military sector. The focus is on improving civ-mil cooperation, information sharing, and thinking about transformative ideas to encourage unity of action among diverse organizations where there is no unity of command.

Check out the video from last year’s demo below and read more at http://star-tides.net/.  More information about the demo event and to register to attend or present here: http://tidesdemo2011.eventbrite.com/.

If you are planning on attending the demo, or are in the DC area and would like to chat with Willow while she’s there, we’d love to hear from you.  Please leave a comment or send us an email.  We’re also monitoring tweets mentioning @gwoborg if you’d like to contact us that way.  While you’re at it, be sure to follow us on Twitter.

TIDES stands for Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support. This research project is coordinated at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) at the National Defense University (NDU), which is part of the Department of Defense. http://star-tides.net/